After three decades of grinding granite and manufacturing
construction supplies for area builders, Gilroy Concrete and
Building Materials will close at the end of the year amid a
national construction slow-down, sources said.
After three decades of grinding granite and manufacturing construction supplies for area builders, Gilroy Concrete and Building Materials will close at the end of the year amid a national construction slow-down, sources said.
The local supplier is owned by Graniterock, a privately owned company based in Watsonville, with annual sales of $50 million, according to Hoovers, a financial research company. President and CEO Bruce Woolpert, the grandson of founder A.R. Wilson, said the company has considered shutting down the Gilroy operation – before the onset of the housing slump. He said he is trying to find comparable positions for Gilroy’s 20 employees at some of the 26 other branches spanning eight Bay area counties.
“We’re asking people to look at other positions in the company,” said Woolpert, adding that since he knows his employees personally, he also knows that some live in such as Los Banos and could not feasibly commute 80 miles to, say, San Jose: the site of a major Graniterock branch. Woolpert said he would likely concentrate the company’s future energy farther north, closer to the heart of Santa Clara County.
“I hope everyone is retained, but I am learning that there is some difficulty for people because they don’t all live right there in Gilroy,” Woolpert said from his Watsonville office Monday, which will become the nearest branch to Gilroy after Salinas.
Gilroy employees who do not find work at other company locations or simply decide it is time to move on will receive severance packages, Woolpert said.
Graniterock branches offer engineering expertise and/or various construction materials such as concrete mix, asphalt, rock, gravel and sand. Together with the national housing slump, the Gilroy branch had outgrown its industrial lot on Chestnut Street years ago and was having trouble supplying its customers efficiently, Woolpert said.
“We’re having a similar problem to what Wal-Mart had in Gilroy,” said Woolpert, referring to the closing of the regular Wal-Mart and subsequent opening of the Wal-Mart Supercenter on Camino Arroyo. “We don’t have the choice of getting bigger where we are.”
Closing the Gilroy location will keep the company limber and profitable for the hundreds of other employees and customers scattered across the Bay area, Woolpert added.
But the demand for construction aggregate parallels construction activity, which contracted 0.3 percent in October, according to a U.S. Commerce Department report that will be released Friday.
It does not appear likely that another manufacturer will fill Graniterock’s vacuum.
As president of the city’s nonprofit Economic Development Corporation, Larry Cope recruits and consults with businesses interested in moving to Gilroy. He said he did not have any manufacturing companies on the back burner that he would try to move into Graniterock’s site on Chestnut Street in southeast Gilroy.
Because the land is zoned as industrial, Cope said that he only envisioned another manufacturer moving in if anything. Sinuous metal pipes, rock quarries, orange cement trucks and stone-covered conveyer belts accent the property now, but after New Year’s, the hissing and clanking of a one-time local stalwart will fall quiet.
